We wrote several new papers elaborating the idea of epistemic fluency. One of them is this chapter: Goodyear, P., & Markauskaite, L. (2018). Epistemic resourcefulness and the development of evaluative judgement. In D. Boud, R. Ajjawi, P. Dawson, & J. Tai (Eds.), Developing evaluative judgement in higher education: Assessment for knowing and producing quality work (pp. 28-38). London: Routledge.
Abstract
“This chapter examines the development of evaluative judgement from a professional education perspective, with a focus on the abilities students need to deal with problems that are both complex and novel. Professional work regularly entails engaging in knowledgeable action in previously unencountered situations and formulating impromptu methods for making judgements about the adequacy of one’s actions. From this perspective, evaluative judgement is an epistemic (knowledge-creating) activity. We show how developing evaluative judgement can be understood as learning to play a range of epistemic games, and how epistemic resourcefulness enables one to frame complex judgements in principled ways.”
Extended overview
“Our chapter is primarily a contribution to the task of theorising evaluative judgement. While we believe that this has practical educational payoffs, which we outline in the final section of the chapter, we are also motivated by a curiosity about the kinds of work and capabilities that are involved in evaluative judgement – within and for professional action. In a nutshell, we argue in this chapter that evaluative judgement can be seen as an epistemic capability, useful in assessing one’s ability to engage in knowledgeable action in specific, dynamically changing situations. We draw on some of our recent empirical and theoretical research to show how a broad range of examples of professional knowledge work can be categorised within a taxonomy of epistemic games. The ability to recognise and participate in these games is a manifestation of epistemic fluency and we can think of the corresponding personal capabilities in terms of epistemic resourcefulness. We illustrate this approach to conceptualising evaluative judgement and its development, with a discussion of one particularly relevant kind of professional epistemic game: the evaluation game. From this base, we develop an argument about the need for evaluative judgement to be considered from a generative perspective. In rapidly changing and uncertain times, professionals cannot get by with methods and standards for assessing worth or quality that are carved in stone. Epistemic resourcefulness enables people to formulate novel, principled, approaches to the making of evaluative judgements.”
epistemic fluency 